Help:Getting started

PLoSWiki runs on top of MediaWiki, with the result that most things work just like wikipedia. Therefore, the first places to look for tips on editing, syntax, etc. is are the mediawiki and wikipedia help pages.

Important Differences from Wikipedia

Links to wikipedia. PLoSWiki is not intended to have comprehensive content, so links to wikipedia are encouraged. Just prefix your link with 'wp:'. For instance, [[w:Ochre Sea Star|Ochre Sea Star]] renders to Ochre Sea Star. Links to other wikis will always display in blue, even if the destination pages do not exist. Be sure to check your links!

Templates. PLoSWiki does not support most Wikipedia templates. Simple templates can be transcluded from wikipedia to a local page and then used in PLoSWiki (as done for Template:PDB, for instance), but this doesn't work well for complex templates. We're working on solutions to this. For now, post requests for wikipedia templates in the Discussion page for this article.

References. Wikipedia uses the {{cite}} template for references. PLoSWiki does not support this template, and uses <ref>...</ref> tags instead. These can be easily combined with Pubmed IDs to have easy consistent references. See PLoSWiki:Citing Sources for more examples.

Figure hooks. PLoS articles are encouraged to include in-text hooks to every figure (eg 'see figure 1'). See these examples for a wiki-compatible way of referencing figures and tables.

License. This wiki uses the CC-BY license, while wikipedia uses the more restrictive CC-BY-SA license. This means that PLOS content can be used on wikipedia but not vice versa.